So you're out of the house for the weekend, and you've brought your trusty laptop with you, but you need something from your home machine. Here are a ton of different ways you can get to your home computer from anywhere, whether you just need a few files or full, unfettered access.

Stream Media to All Your Devices From Home

If all you're looking for is access to your music and videos, VPNs and VNC can seem like overkill. Instead, you could just use an app like Air Video (for iPhone users), StreamToMe (for Mac and iPhone users), or Plex (for all users) to live convert and stream your videos to your computers and mobile devices. If it's music you want, Audiogalaxy and Subsonic both provide pretty neat services that let you access your tunes from the web or from your phone—no need to deal with a long, arduous upload process like you would with Google Music (though we do still love Google Music).

If it's torrenting you're into, both of our favorite BitTorrent clients for Windows and OS X have remote UIs built-in. With just a bit of setup, you can monitor your torrents, add new ones, and even download the resulting files to your laptop or smartphone. You can also add new torrents with Dropbox, though you won't be able to monitor them (if that matters to you).

Downloading a big file via BitTorrent can take a long time, and you don't want to sit there…
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These are just a few of the things you can do from afar, but they should get you almost anything you need with minimal setup. If you prefer to have your home computer go to sleep while you're away, you can even set up wake-on-LAN to turn it back on from afar. Got any other remote access tricks we didn't mention? Share them with us in the comments below.